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Today's Google Doodle commemorates the 200th birthday of Charles John Huffam Dickens, the celebrated author of such novels as Great Expectations, Bleak House, Oliver Twist, Pickwick Papers, A Christmas Carol, and many more. Any attempt to list the immortal characters or lines that Dickens created would be hopelessly incomplete, but surely the creator of minor characters such as Sam Weller, Mr. Micawber, Sairey Gamp, Wemmick, the Artful Dodger would deserve our attention, even had he not also left us characters such as Pip, David Copperfield, Lady Dedlock, Arthur Clennam, or villains like Uriah Heep, James Carker, Tulkinghorn, Madame Defarge, and the like.
It is commonplace today to say that Dickens's greatest character was London itself. From a very young age, Dickens paced its streets relentlessly, watching and listening to the behavior of people from all walks of life, incorporating it into his writing. (Before his writerly career, he clerked at a law office, where one of the lawyers specifically commented on his ability to impersonate "the low" people of London.)
Dickens's fiction, particularly his early novels, was wildly popular, setting off a storm of merchandising and unlicensed theatrical adaptations on both sides of the Atlantic. If today we are increasingly concerned with the pernicious effects of overreaching copyright law, Dickens himself was always furious about the fact that the lack of international copyright agreements meant that American publishers were able to reap massive profits from his work, without paying him a shilling.
Many modern readers assume that Dickens's fiction could be long because he was paid by the word, but this is a slander of later years.
Beyond his fiction, Dickens was also a tireless journalist, editing several periodicals and contributing original reporting for most of his career. And while many of his novels directly addressed social concerns – such as Oliver Twist and the New Poor Law, or Nicholas Nickleby and education, or Little Dorrit and debt (not to mention the woes of the Circumlocution Office!) – his social interests were not exhausted by fiction alone. As a philanthropist, he raised money for many notable causes, and was particularly well-known for Urania Cottage, a refuge for so-called "fallen women."
Anticipating the celebrities of the late 20th century, Dickens was involved in a high-profile scandal, occasioned by his separation from his wife. In fact provoked by his relationship with the young actress Ellen Ternan, the popular rumor was that he had taken up with his wife's sister, Georgina Hogarth. This so incensed him that he took out a high-profile advertisement denouncing the rumor, and his sister-in-law even endured an exam to demonstrate her virginity!
It's fair to say that no novelist has ever meant as much to so many of his contemporaries as Dickens. Beyond his readers, Dickens's legacy has been made secure by countless film adaptations of his work. David Lean's versions of Oliver Twist (with Alec Guiness as Fagin!) and Great Expectations are famous, but probably the most accurate possible adaptation is South Park's version of Great Expectations. After all, the sophisticated animation of Trey Parker and Matt Stone is able to capture the robot monkeys of Dickens's great novel as even CGI never could.
Why not check out the worldwide celebrations of Dickens's life and works?
